Book Notes: Something worse can always happen in ‘The Stars Are Fire’

The first paragraph of Anita Shreve’s new novel, “The Stars Are Fire,” is a real beauty. She opens her gripping story on a spring day in 1947. The Maine coastal town of Hunts Beach is so sopping wet that it’s impossible to hang laundry on the line to dry. Suddenly there’s a break in the weather and the women get busy. The last sentence of the introductory paragraph reads: “With white sheets, undershirts, and rags flapping in the wind, it looked as though an entire town of women had surrendered.”

The first paragraph accomplishes a lot. Shreve’s writing is both lovely and purposeful, her words gracefully orienting us. A few sentences into the book and we’re off and running, wholly under the spell of an expert storyteller.

Shreve, author of 18 novels and a resident of both Maine and New Hampshire, often writes about New England. In “The Stars Are Fire,” that spring of endless rain does nothing to ameliorate the ruinous effects of the drought to come. Grace, the mother of two with another due in four months, is only 23. Her husband, a surveyor, grows increasingly abusive and detached. When his wealthy mother dies, he shuts down completely. Grace and Gene’s marriage, due to pregnancy, becomes a microcosm of good and evil -- a weighty node of energy that drives this book to its conclusion. Of course, no Shreve character is plainly good or evil.

Offsetting the grimness are Grace’s mother and her best friend, Rosie, who also live in the small seaside town of Hunts Beach. Bonds among these women are strong because Shreve’s women are strong. We take comfort in the ways the women share work, fun and worries.

By late fall, all of coastal Maine is a tinderbox. When fire inevitably breaks out, towns up and down the coastline are leveled. In Hunts Beach, 150 of 156 houses burn and people, lacking any kind of advance warning technology, must run for their lives. Grace drags Rosie and their children to the surf where they lay on their stomachs, half submerged in bitterly cold water and wet blankets, and dig air pockets in the sand to breathe. There they spend a horrific night as the blast furnace holds them at bay. When she finally raises her head and opens her eyes the next morning, all she sees are the skeleton chimneys reaching up from the charred, smoking earth. Hypothermic and nearly dead, Grace loses the baby but she and her two children survive.

Gene, her husband, had joined other men to create a fire break in advance of the oncoming fire. Gene is one of two men who go missing that night, leaving Grace to find food and shelter for her homeless family once she recovers from hypothermia and the still birth of her son.

Post-war America was on the cusp of tremendous growth and change in 1947. But in remote and coastal Maine, the old ways were still entrenched. Women didn’t drive. Husbands and wives lacking reliable birth control, produced a lot of children. The division of labor -- women cared for family and home -- made sense but left women less skilled and less welcome in the labor market. Grace had to start from scratch.

Grace meets good men and women who round out her life by showing qualities absent in her abusive husband. One man, the doctor who treats her daughter’s scarlet fever, hires Grace a job to put some order to the administrative chaos in his clinic. Another man, a squatter in Gene’s mother’s house, is a concert pianist who, like everyone else, is putting his life back together after losing everything. Both men respond to Grace’s compassion and competence, and give her new material she uses to build a stronger sense of self.

Shreve tackles dark subjects like shame, sexual abuse and emotional deprivation. She’s a good storyteller in the genre of New England gothic. When Grace is at her lowest, a man drives by her and she realizes he’s naked and engaged in an act of perversion. Yes, something else can always go wrong, and if you read to the novel’s conclusion you will see that Grace’s challenges don’t end with the massive conflagration. Aspirations can be squelched. Love interests extinguished. Peace shattered. Fortunately we’re reading about New England, where resourcefulness is not just virtuous, it’s victorious.

-- Rae Francoeur is a freelance journalist and author. She can be reached at rae@raefrancoeur.com.